****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I bought this book because I am a fan of the magician/detective genre. I enjoy settings in gaming environments and hoped that this book would be a combination of the two concepts. Unfortunately the book in more a collection of the cliches from both genres rather than a fresh story involving the elements common to both. Little or no character development also hurts the book. The pace is somewhat plodding as well. Finally if you are not familiar with the Eberron game setting then you lose a lot of the significance of the setting.Sometimes, you can tell an author had just seen a movie or read a book and asked himself: "How can I adapt this plot into a new story I can tell?" Some people call this plagiarism, while others swear on the validity of "tribute" art (just look at the success of ETAs -- Elvis Tribute Artists). If you had told be that a piece of fantasy-themed tribute prose based on Daschiell Hammett's classic "the Maltese Falcon" (and the film of the same name) would ever make its way onto my bookshelf, I'd have said you're crazy.But it did.And I liked it.Let me explain. Parker De Wolf's novel is not such a transparent "port" of the "Falcon" to Wizards of the Coast's Eberron setting; it actually requires a little bit of paying attention to themes, reversals and strategies that Hammett pioneered with Sam Spade (not having the book directly in front of me makes it hard to cite specific examples). A red-haired elf takes the place of O'Shaughnessy and, while there is no Joel Ciaro to be found, it's hard to imagine the chief villain without picturing (and reading his lines as) Sydney Greenstreet.Mr. De Wolf does the original justice, with well thought out applications of typical literary devices of the noir genre mixed in with some more recent, adult-oriented additions to noir canon (such as drug abuse and addiction). If Mr. De Wolf has a flaw in what would otherwise be an excellent noir fantasy classic, it is in not cleaving closely enough to the pulp noir style in his written vernacular as well as in his material. Too often, it seems, Mr. De Wolf choses to use the language of a fantasy author instead of that of a pulp novelist; if he had done the genre justice in this regard, he would have made his tribute piece more than a tribute, it would be a testament.I've read a few of the Eberron novels and have been pleasantly surprised at what I've found. I generally detest most fantasy as being far too sappy and florid for me -- this is a flaw that few Eberron books possess. Each Eberron novel I've read, I've read at least one sequel to, but usually just because I'd read the previous novel and was interested to see how things played out. With The Left Hand of Death, Parker De Wolf has made me look forward to another Eberron novel, not to see what will happen to his characters next, but to see how much more he, as an author, can do.I've read several Eberron novels, and this is the worst of them. The characters are shallow, at best, and represent (at best) thin fantasy stereotypes, acting and reacting in ways that do nothing to help describe them as personalities -- they merely exist to move the ersatz story along. Early in the book, the main character enlists/demands the help of the bartender who runs the inn where he rents a room -- the same bartender who let him get arrested a few pages earlier. Eh? Of course the bartender goes right along and suddenly becomes his faithful sidekick -- and he's good with a sword, too.The plot, what there is of it, proceeds like an old 1st Edition DnD adventure, without the slightest nod to why things might happen -- they just do, and you're supposed to be happy with them. For example, when the main character is arrested and interrogated by magical means, he suddenly blasts the wizard questioning him in the chest with some kind of energy, blowing him out of the holding cell. The captain of the watch, who ordered the interrogation, simply gets angry and lets the guy go. Huh? What? I don't get it other than that the author suddenly wanted the action to take place elsewhere and couldn't figure out a way to move out from that scene smoothly. Those are the sort of herky-jerky transitions that punctuate the book throughout.It's a shame, too, because the world in which the story takes place is an interesting one, and has been treated with much more skill by other authors. Avoid this book -- your time is worth more.
